Karnickel

> I am arguing that some do.

What is the purpose of finding someone, anyone, who holds some fringe opinion to attack it as if its common? You can find any opinion about anything out there after all.

> Quoting some articles arguing that there are differences doesn't prove anything.

It proves that the opinion you attack does not seem to be the opinion of the scientific community. Unfortunately you did not include a single link to show whom or what exactly your comment is about.

I hope you don't consider it rude or an "attack" that I point out that you did not point to anyone/anywhere specifically? Because you really did not. I think your argument would benefit greatly from being more specific.

I have Facebook friends (who I keep because they are ex colleagues and mostly harmless otherwise) whose whole life (judging by their news feed) seems to be centered around finding the most stupid comments on the entire Internet and then posting them to show how stupid they are. Your comment strongly reminds me of that phenomenon. Personally, I consider it not only highly illogical but also a huge waste of time, not to mention what it probably does for your outlook on life to concentrate on the most absurd and ridiculous fringe opinions that you can find.

Also, counter to your latest claim, you make no such distinction at all. You attack the position as if it's common. The Facebook friends I mention at least include specific links that they attack. Not that that would make much sense given that we are here discussing a specific article.

> The "America is too spread out" argument is total bullshit.

In support of this statement, here is a map of "mega regions": http://www.america2050.org/sync/elements/america2050map.png

Source: http://www.america2050.org/maps/

Alternative: "The Mega-Regions of North America" http://martinprosperity.org/content/the-mega-regions-of-nort...

> All told, these dozen mega-regions span 243 metropolitan areas in the U.S. and Canada, more than six in ten of all U.S. metros. They have a combined population of more than 230 million people, including 215 million from the United States or 70 percent of the U.S. population. Together, they produce more than $13 trillion dollars in economic output, equivalent to three-quarters of America’s total GDP.

Vast regions of the US don't even matter for the purpose of this discussion. When you only look at those regions the problem is no different than in a lot of other countries. That is also the geographical level where public transport makes sense, it's per-region (and different regions may want to/have to solve it in very different ways since their respective situations are different), not one solution for the whole country.

> the bold statements about no difference between men and women brains, everything is nurture/nothing nature, etc.

You are attacking a position that is not the common scientist position at all. Your whole comment is a bit surprising given the context. You went out of your way to invent a reason to vent.

"Study finds some significant differences in brains of men and women": http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/study-finds-some-sign...

https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/2014...

It does not even matter how accurate any of those articles are, this just serves to show that the claim made by OP is wrong. There are plenty of science articles about differences.

So what exactly is the basis for your claim again? Did you do any research of your position at all (and just googling quickly before posting already counts)? It seems to be entirely made up.

> made up opinion

Such as yours? :-)

It's not paid by taxes but by health insurance. We have both a private and a semi-public system (managed by "Krankenkassen", independent insurance entities, that compete for members; it's... complicated, but less so than in the US, and it does not depend on the employer).

Some might say it's like a tax, it gets deducted from your paycheck, but then that's the same everywhere, including the US. Difference is that it's managed by independent entities and not the government, and they even compete. The private insurances are quite significant in Germany too. You are allowed to leave the government-mandated "Krankenkassen" if you earn over a certain amount of money per year, then you have to get private insurance - which is less expensive if you are young, but unlike the Krankenkasse family members (e.g. non.working spouse, children) are not included and it may become much more expensive when you get older, it's hard to predict because it depends on many factors including if you picked the right insurance company (that didn't lose as much money and now has to raise prices).

On the other hand, at least in the cities there is a ton of pharmacies - sometimes even across the street form one another, and easily every few hundred meters along major routes. There are way too many. When I walk through downtown Nuremberg I walk past several of them, right on the main pedestrian-only street of the city. And they are all allowed to advertise in their shop windows. So that's some prime advertising space, right in the hard of the city. On my way to downtown, a twelve minute walk, I walk past four pharmacies if I take the route along the street (vs. the lake route, which is a park).

Also, they are allowed to advertise for things like cold medicine, when I still had a TV (log time ago, admittedly) I remember seeing lots and lots of such ads: "WICK MediNait cold medicinefor the night", list of ingredients: https://www.aponet.de/wissen/arzneimitteldatenbank/suchergeb... (active ingredients Paracetamol, doxylamine hydrogen succinate, ephedrine hemisulfate, Dextromethorphan hydrobromide-1-water)

> it should be up to me if the pain is server enough to warrant opioids

It is!

You do get the drugs you need. If you actually ARE in pain. But this woman, as predicted by her doctor, was not. If you read the article, she did not have the pain, it was only fear of it.

Society does have to pay the price in the end if people are given what they want. See the problem of over-subscription of anything from pain killers (in the US) to antibiotics.

Not least, those drugs show up in ground water and in drinking water supplies, and water companies can't really filter that stuff out.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pharmaceuticals-i...

https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/drugs-in-our-dr...

If you think "the levels are low - that is save", there is no scientific basis for such a statement. We have no clue what low-level exposure to drug cocktails does.

Not sure how you manage to come up with such a comment after reading this particular article. Clearly she did not have the pain she feared she would have. She said she took two Ibuprofen - that she did not need!

So why would you think she would have been better off taking drugs against pain that she didn't have?

Real pain is treated here in Germany - of course!

But taking pills for mere fear of pain that isn't even there?

I had had four wisdom teeth removed all at once, that's when I got and took a few (a few!) Ibuprofen during the following week. Only because I actually lived and worked in the US at the time (but had the surgery done during a vacation in Germany), and had to go back to work, doing IT training for a few days. Otherwise I would have taken even less.

Later I had jaw surgery, lower jaw extension by 4 mm (no metal left inside me, by the way, it was a z-cut followed by the shift and half of a bone could reattach to the other half, just shifted lengthwise a bit), so a complete cut through the lower jaw. I did not need a single pain pill.

In most common cases, like shallow clones and cloning simple objects, are already well-covered and solved, often with very few lines of code or even just a single command (`Object.assign()`). Stage 4 draft (i.e. it will be in the next version): `{ ...obj }` to clone an object [0].

Cloning Arrays, Maps, Sets is easy using their default constructors in a single line, such as `new Map(originalMap)` or `new Set(originalSet)` [1]. You can clone an array using spread syntax or `Array.from` [2].

Another issue is that there are many variants of "deep cloning". Some people only need actual "regular" object properties cloned - copying objects without any of the features you get through `Object.defineProperty()`, like object literals.

Some people want symbols cloned, others don't.

Some people don't care about functions. Some people want some things, like functions, not cloned but referenced to avoid duplication.

Some people want all the options copied that you get from `Object.defineProperty()`.

Some people care about the prototype chain, others don't (if you only clone regular objects, e.g. from object literal object creation and similar ones).

So there is huge variety about what people need when they talk about "deep-copying" in Javascript, because objects have so many optional features, but most of the time they are not needed or not relevant to the copying.

As others have said, it also is not actually all that essential. I use a functional style without OOP (this, bind, class (ES6 or ES5 "pseudo-class" construction), try not to mutate, and I rarely need deep-cloning, if at all. I think right now I only use my carefully crafted and speed-tested deep-clone module in tests. Each time I started using it in my code I eventually came up with a much better solution that didn't need it. Note that I did not actively try to avoid it, it just happened - the use case went away by itself each time I came up with an improved version of the code.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/30626071/544779

[2] https://www.briangonzalez.org/post/copying-array-javascript

> You haven't provided any argument in how they are different

You are quite the joker. Or maybe you have some real problems reading English?

Try again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16197689

Of course, it's been quite obvious for a while that you are just trolling.

> that your claim that there isnt at all is wrong.

Well, it isn't, as I already pointed out. Is the main strength of your argument how often you repeat it?

> So your claim is simply wrong.

Ah, yes, as I suspected. A strong conviction in place of arguments, reasoning and considering other people's arguments.

Do you seriously compare the total amounts of something HUGE and something tiny? The size of the cash universe still is orders of magnitude larger than Silkroad ever was - and you compare the totals? Seriously?

I don't understand what your question has to do with anything I wrote. Unless your intention is not an actual honest discussion, but to mislead - but surely that cannot be true.

Not like cash at all. You can't pay with cash unless you are right there. Also, paying with large amounts of cash is hard or suspicious or even impossible.

I think your comment raises some very interesting points, but that you go too far.

There are costs (in the wider not just monetary sense) and benefits to various approaches. The reason you had to resort to crypto-currency first of all seems to me to be the problems in the countries you lived in. If they had working institutions, if you had lived in a Western country and had had access to the banking there, would you have come to the same conclusions?

Also, there is a reason why Western banks and Asian ones too, it seems, prefer losing business over dealing with customers from some countries, and I doubt the reason is spite.

Having completely anonymous money sure benefits some small businesses (mostly those living in places with bad institutions), but it also enables a lot of very questionable businesses and people. I would suspect that as far as volume goes the latter might actually be far bigger than the former. As always those who have most to gain are those who have a lot of money to move (same with the question about who benefits from government more - the rich or the poor? The rich! Any "redistribution" is dwarfed by the amounts of money people get to make and to keep under the protections of strong government institutions). Anonymity, not just for money, always works for those who have their eyes closed to all the horrible things humans do when nobody is looking - and that is not a negligibly small amount. Of course, the extremely wealthy already have "anonymous money", tracing who owns what is very hard even for the government, but I doubt giving everybody access to anonymity would be a net positive.

As a software architect (current title, but I had a technical education, "electrical/mechanical", incl. technical drawing, lab work, metal work, decades ago, before studying CS), who prefers text most of the time I still can see the appeal of something like this (All links lead to pictures):

- http://forums.ni.com/legacyfs/online/202594_Hololens_LabVIEW...

- http://sine.ni.com/cms/images/casestudies/a14_02.jpg?size

- https://m.eet.com/content/images/edn/LabVIEW-NXG_editor_1920...

Even this is not any worse than a complex text-based software project, you can zoom to the part that you want to look at in detail, just like you navigate between modules/classes/code files:

- http://www.ni.com/cms/images/devzone/pub/nrjsxmfm91216399872...

Also beneficial for a visual approach is that that is how electrical circuits are visualized. It's been a long time, maybe they describe more electrical circuits in text (I know VHDL but that is not for all kinds of circuits, nor does it concentrate on the electrical aspects), AFAIK it's still mostly diagrams.

Another point is that unlike software, where you deal with abstract things in any case (even registers, if you program in assembler, are pretty abstract). What you design in LabView is made of actual physical components, and you really physically run wires from one to the next.

What is shown as an enclosing box with "gates" between inside and outside as in this diagram really looks like this, LabView is a simulation of a physical system:

- http://www.egr.msu.edu/classes/me451/me451_labs/robot/LabVIE...

I have done quite a few courses (edX, Coursera) over the last few years, and when there were LabView portions I had no difficulty and actually found it quite appealing. I would not say the same for software, where I still prefer text.

    if bots can produce 'worthy set of opinions' we would be totally useless

Are you useless because other people write comments? What is the difference between it being a biological human and an artificial human - should we ever get that far?

Apart from quality and relevance considerations I'm reminded of the situation where people open businesses that already exist, or people try to get jobs despite other people existing that are actually better. For example, why doesn't BMW stop producing cars, after all, there's Mercedes-Benz (and very close too), or vice versa. Or why is there yet another bakery. Or why do I try to get that programming job and don't even mind to admit that I'm probably not even among the best 1% of people for that particular job. Because none of that matters. My advantage in the last case is I'm here (interviewing) while those other people are not. Same with the bakery and the car makers. The existence of something else isn't a reason unless there is a direct impact.

Even if we ever make something that is far more intelligent than us. Still no reason to expect that that new thing is going to murder each and everyone. We don't murder each and every creature that is orders of magnitude less intelligent than us (the extinction event that we started notwithstanding, that's a side effect because of limited space on the planet). We don't murder our own less intelligent members of society either.

To extend on the last point, the real human intelligence is not as much in the individual members of this society - but in the network that we present. Place any human being alone in a remote region and see what they accomplish. They will actually die, most likely. The power of humanity is not the individuals, it's a huge invisible "cloud" of stuff: The knowledge, the "magic items" that were created by this "human cloud" over time (like a computer, or just a can of Coke [1]).

Even if we created something that is an order of magnitude more intelligent than any human being, or even two - it's power (and intelligence!) pales compared to the combined network power of humanity.

Don't look at "humanity" as a bunch of individual hairless mutated apes (i.e. the physical, biological beings), "humanity" is much, MUCH more, most of it invisible to the eye. Knowledge/culture, the way we interact in a gigantic network (like a brain - think of humans as neurons!), the tools and items we have.

In this network there is plenty of room for new "nodes", and if they are truly intelligent they will value the network and - unlike most humans - recognize that their own individual abilities are tiny compared to being part of the whole thing.

Another things is, when/if we can create things that are "better" than us we can also change ourselves. We can improve our bodies, our brains. We will integrate computers and brains, not have them (only) externally. So the humans that "compete" with some super-intelligent AI won't be the humans of today either.

Also check out:

[0] "Joseph Henrich: "The Secret of Our Success" | Talks at Google" https://youtu.be/jaoQh6BoH3c

> Humans are a puzzling species. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? Joseph Henrich's shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.

[1] "What Coke contains" https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499... (it is not actually about Coke)

> The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero... Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. ...every can of Coke contains humanity’s choir.

> I'm pretty sure no one is seriously remotely claiming that machines understand text better than humans.

Just some of the headlines:

- http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/15/technology/reading-robot-ali...

"Computers are getting better than humans at reading"

- http://fortune.com/2018/01/15/artificial-intelligence-ai-chi...

"Computer AI Can Now Read Better Than You Do"

- https://gizmodo.com/ai-used-to-sell-you-more-stuff-can-now-r...

"The AI Used to Sell You More Stuff Can Now Read Better Than a Human"

I've been a heavy user of Flow for - two years now? I also occasionally use TypeScript. I don't contribute to the code (in the Flow case, I don't speak OCaml, I contributed a bit to the type library and the online docs; in the case of TS, I don't use it enough), but I write a bug report each time I find an issue.

I've been looking at the issues list very often, mostly out of curiosity to see what the problems are that people have (both Flow and TS) and to see which project is better at solving problems.

TypeScript seems to win hands down. Their ratio of closed tickets to open tickets is far better than that of Flow:

- TypeScript: 2,515 open, 12,716 closed -- https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues

- Flow: 1,830 open, 2,467 closed -- https://github.com/facebook/flow/issues

I have to assume they mostly close issues after solving them - it is not unheard of that issues are closed merely because they've been lying around for a few months without any updates (definitely happens for Flow).

I prefer the approach of Flow, but I think the actual developers are not present at all on Github, most answers come from other users. There are very few actual solutions to issues that are raised. The list of issues grows ever larger. Flow does make progress, and it's not even bad. Every 10-15 days we get a new release and I'd say the progress is quite okay. What went really well the last 12 months was IDE integration for Flow in the case of Jetbrains Webstorm (for TS the situation always looked good), as of now, latest Webstorm version, it's actually usable. I still get too many Flow server crashes though, which may be due to my platform (Windows 10), not sure. However, it's now automatically restarted most of the time.

A TypeScript anecdote: I filed an issue that a "Member" closed as "works as intended" after a few comments back and forth (but it was clear right away that this would be the end). I filed it again - this time Anders Hejlsberg himself responded and acknowledged the issue (it was kind of fundamental and not just something unimportant), and it got fixed. So here too you need a bit of luck to get through to someone who actually understands the subject well enough (including knowing when they don't understand it, if that first guy had just stopped handling my issue it would have been fine). But that's the price of using a popular large project, so this is not a complaint - just an anecdote, okay?

What I do get for myself after following the two type systems for well over two years is that there are LOTS of restrictions. Just read some of the issues in both Github repos, it's really interesting.

I find the whole situation very unsatisfying. It is clear - when you actually use it heavily for a big project for a longer period - that a type system on top of Javascript is very difficult to maintain. LOTS of unsolved cases and issues. You definitely have to adapt and use only the subset of Javascript and the type system that works. I validate an object manually and I still have to do an "any" cast in Flow because Flow does not recognize that my `if` statement secures the type. Or I have to insert such `if` statements even though from the context it is perfectly clear what I get there. For example, any inner functions, e.g. when using map, filter, reduce, loses the type if you use a variable from the outer scope. Or you have to use a lot of additional `const` for object properties even though you don't change the object - but the type checker is not intelligent enough to recognize that. You definitely write different code - and while that may seem okay there are plenty of cases where it really is objectively unnecessary, but you have to do it to satisfy the type system.

On the bright side, once you get your code all "type system ready" you really do find bugs - even if it's just a few. Also good is that I now get much better autocompletion suggestions in the IDE. There's a reason why I (as project head) still insist on us using Flow even though I say "WTF?" often enough. It does cost a significant amount of time though - a very significant amount. I've been willing to do it because of the kind of project, which is going to be a very low-level building block for later larger projects, so it is worth spending a lot more resources on getting it right compared to a project that's on a top layer, on which nothing else depends.

Still, overall I have very mixed feelings and I see the type checkers (both TS or Flow, or any other that could be written) on top of a language that doesn't have types as a kludge that does not look like a long-term solution. There is too much friction between the language and the type system.

I won't dispute it because of the general "If you've never seen a black swan, is that proof that none exists? (No)" fallacy, but speaking as a German, I cannot remember having seen one in Germany, ever. So even if one exists it's an exceedingly rare thing.

When I lived in the US I always found it unnecessary that everybody has to stop. In Germany we always have a "main" road and a "secondary" road, and those on the main road don't have to stop. That priority pattern is kept from major roads to tiny roads. Then there's the "right before left" rule when the roads are equal - creating a priority without signs and without "everybody has to stop" rule.

I know I won't get any updates for the system for my 2012 Dell XPS 8500 (256 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM, i7 CPU - I don't see a need for an upgrade, it's all there).

Does that mean I'll just be left out cold? That's how I understand it.

When I run the Microsoft Powershell plugin that they made available to check the protection status (`Get-SpeculationControlSettings`) I get a "True" for 3 of 8 items (only showing those 3):

  Windows OS support for branch target injection mitigation is present: True
  Windows OS support for kernel VA shadow is present: True
  Windows OS support for kernel VA shadow is enabled: True

One of the Walzwerk founders (Christiane Schmidt [2]) is from Saalfeld, a town very close to where I grew up. I've been to the restaurant a few times, usually with American coworkers, once with a friend from Saalfeld, so there was a lot of talk with Christiane that evening, and we went out with them after they had closed the restaurant. That was well over ten years ago though, almost fifteen, so I can't speak for the food they serve today. Back then it was quite authentic apart from the Thuringian sausages ("bratwurst thüringer art" on the menu [3]). They still were good, but you won't get Thuringian sausages outside Thuringia, impossible, even if many are labeled "Thuringian". No idea why, the recipe can't be that much of a secret or too difficult. Anyway, the Walzwerk that I knew (until 2004) has my recommendation, since it's under the same ownership it probably still is a good destination :-)

I guess you know that, but just to add a few links for others, the name "Walzwerk" (translation: "rolling mill") refers to an East German steel factory [0] (very very dirty and run-down at the time of the reunification) about 15 miles from where I used to live. Today it looks a lot different [1] (like everything around that area - from lots of ashes, even ash mountains, and gray, to clean rivers and everything is orders of magnitude nicer).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyxg9JUSkDE (German video)

[1] http://www.stahlwerk-thueringen.de/

[2] 2011: Article in the local Thuringian newspaper about the Walzwerk (German): http://www.otz.de/web/zgt/leben/detail/-/specific/In-einer-S...

[3] http://www.walzwerk.com/menu/

I'm originally from one of those former GDR states (they became states after reunification, during the GDR they were smaller districts - "Bezirke" [0]).

The countryside is slowly dying, even though it still looks pretty nice in the tiny villages (albeit a bit dead). In the towns it can be a bit depressing. I grew up in a town with >35,000 inhabitants just 5 miles from another town of the same size, and lots of villages all around (you can never really get lost in a German forest, just continue walking and you'll get to the next village or town soon). Those same towns now have ~25,000 inhabitants - and the distribution has shifted towards a lot more old people.

In Thuringia, for example (the geographic center of Germany, home of Goethe and of Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert :-) ), the state capital Erfurt (206,000) is doing well, and Jena (108,000) with its Carl Zeiss optics manufacturing [1] and a good university is too. The rest - not so much. Even though cities like Weimar (65,000) look pretty nice and still attract tourism and the population is stable (not shrinking already is a success) they are not exactly the "place to be".

So the larger cities are doing well - same as everywhere in the world: People are moving to the urban centers. Better services, better/more jobs, better everything (well, except for space and cost of living).

By the way, since we are talking about very good food: This is a sad topic. Germans prefer "cheap" most of all. I have an Italian friend who represents Italian food companies in Germany. He told me they (Italians) sell the good stuff to countries like Spain or France, and the lower quality products to Germany. The reason is not that they dislike Germans, it's the German buyers themselves: In all negotiations the most important topic by far is price, quality doesn't come close. When I visit family in Thuringia it's even worse. I can find okayish food, sure, but it's not easy. Even the Asian fast food in my big West German city is a hundred times better than similar food in a Thuringian town (and they are pretty bad, since they have to offer full meals for 4-8 Euros, no comparison at all to the Asian food I'm used to from when I lived in the Bay Area). I also have a friend who owns a pretty nice middlish restaurant in Thuringia. He has become pretty depressed over the years, and his place is really nice and had good food too (and I say that as a picky eater). His place is not as good as it used to be, he doesn't care all that much any more because it's just not worth it. He's just too old and too well-connected locally to go somewhere else and do something completely new.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezirk_%28DDR%29

[1] https://www.zeiss.com/carl-zeiss-jena/home.html

IMO there are a lot of needlessly downvoted comments on HN these days. A few months ago I was trying to stem that tide and upvoted downvoted comments when I saw no reason for those downvotes. It really looks completely random many times, or at the very least "I disagree", but without any attempt of making a counter argument.

However, my voting rights were removed, and when I asked HN by contact email I was told I was behaving like a "troll" - the reasoning: I upvoted comments other people had downvoted, so I must be out to cause trouble! I gave up that account and don't care any more, I also hardly ever participate any more. I think the HN site admins contribute to this, being called a "troll" for doing what I still think was reasonable - I did not upvote a single comment that was in any way, shape or form objectively bad. They all had no insults, were no "cheap shots", not too short, not useless - they didn't even voiced troubling opinions. I still don't understand why they were dowvoted in the first place. The opinion of the site admin seems to be "you have to live with downvotes" and, at least in my case, when you try to work against what I think is clear downvote-abuse, you are assumed to be a "troll".

Okay, I think voicing a negative opinion about the site is going to go down well... but that's okay. I think this site would be better off with no voting at all, given that a sizable number of downvoted comments don't deserve it at all.

1 Get a die

2 Decide which numbers on the die represent which decision

3 Roll the die

4 Use that random decision

. ...time passes...

5 You really dislike the decision made by the die? Go with the other one

6 Should you dislike the opposite too stop thinking about it and go with the decision the die made for you

7 If you still have not done anything it may mean you don't really care about making a decision, which may have deeper meaning that is far beyond what the Internet can help you with

I don't think that that is the idea.

I think the reason is similar to what was shown for seat belts:

When you know you are protected you take more risks. If criminals can protect themselves they are probably more likely to use violence in the first place.

> I'm extremely curious about how you found out

Exclusion and desperation. I got nothing from various doctors despite problems that I thought should be treatable. It had very, very slowly gotten worse over two to three decades. It is very, very subtle, and until a threshold was reached I described myself as "100% healthy" - completely ignoring a myriad of increasing little problems. Because each and every one of them has alternative explanations, usually: aging, office/computer work, stress, wrong food, "everybody has problems", etc. Soooo much went away under chelation treatment that I didn't even have on the radar, things that I had attributed to the mentioned untreatable problems, mostly aging or stress or food. But it wasn't!

I thought that my problems seemed very treatable/diagnosable, but nobody even tried. "You take Nexium (a PPI) for the rest of your life" said a professor of gastroenterology, which to me was pure torture, I never felt as bad in my life as when I used that stuff. Then I found that I had a massive Candida problem, which had started when I took the PPI. A doctor confirmed it (the professor had ignored everything I had told him and thought it's all in my head), I was even given systemic anti-fungals (fluconazole), with huge positive effect, but then my hands where yellow... I then learned that Candida never is a root cause, always a symptom. Apparently I didn't have any of the usual medical textbook problems that lead to such a problem. The only thing left was something I found in the forums of the "crazy people": They claimed Candida often is a problem of people with a heavy metal problem. With nothing left to try and to lose I went down that route: Take measurements, find a specialist (I had to go very far), start chelation and see if it helps. Well, the measurements should middlish amounts of mercury, "You are in a gray zone but I can justify chelation therapy" said the doctor. The real proof came with the unexpectedly large success over the years.

.

If I was a doctor I would not treat this condition. It is next to impossible to detect - basically, there is no known method to conclusively test if heavy metals are a problem or not. You can get indications, but only acute poisonings with large doses can be shown through a simple test. So how did we know in my case? I was "lucky" enough to have had a few special conditions that lead to an acute surge, so I actually had significant levels (of mercury) in blood, hair and urine. Most people with chronic poisoning won't have that though. The rest of the proof that that indeed was the problem was all the things that started to improve after starting chelation - many of them completely unexpectedly. For example, during chelation, after each round, the tissue around my right-side thyroid was "working" (very active, some pain). The result, shown a year afterwards: A 5 mm nodule in the twice-normal-size thyroid had completely(!) disappeared, and the thyroid was almost normal size. I had had endocrinologists show that nodule and the double-sized right thyroid unchanged over almost three decades. The endocrinologist examined me with ultrasound TWICE because he did not believe his results. There is a lot more, that was just one of the highlights because people like undeniable biomedical imaging proofs, so much better than me saying "I can sleep much better".

So anyway, as I was saying, if I was a doctor I would not treat this condition. The problem is that you need crazy people like me. This requires a long-term commitment for an uncertain outcome. You also need resources - money, TIME (you cannot go on living a regular employee life, the chelators only help get things started, your body has to do most of it, and it requires lots of time and you need to rest or it (the body) won't do anything). Most people would never have that patience, as a doctor you will make your life much harder if you offer those treatments. Not to mention that there is the potential to be right - and make things a lot worse: If somebody indeed has a heavy metal problem chelation may make it worse (it mobilizes more than it can bind, since no chemical bond is eternal and perfect), and if their body already is on edge...

Also, the whole subject is itself poisoned. On the one hand you have few options to show anything conclusively, no good tests, on the other hand the whole topic of heavy metal poisoning, or just poisoning, is extremely popular in "alternative health" circles. So even if you are a doctor, you really, really don't want to be seen working in this area by your colleagues. It's much more acceptable (by both your medical colleagues as well as insurers!) to offer homeopathy, as an MD, than offering chelation. At least that's my observation.

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> Do you think that people with your condition are misdiagnosed on a large scale?

I have no opinion about other people. A lot of things are very special in my own case. I certainly think the problem could be much larger than people think. On the NIH website I found a document that stated that mercury is far more toxic than lead. I took a course from Tufts University [0] about water treatment. Of the four weeks they spent one entire week, 25% of the whole course, only talking about lead. There were two professors, one for the engineering side, one for the medical side, and the medical professor cited study after study and showed graphs that the state of medical science is that the only safe level is zero (technically not feasible - thus not possible to have as an official limit). So there is a lot of attention on lead, has been for decades. I don't see nearly as much on mercury, supposedly much worse, despite there being quite a bit of mercury around us. For example, are you sure eating all that tuna and other sea fish, especially the predatory ones, is such a good idea? In my experience, the one I gained the last few years, involuntarily, the signs are extremely(!) subtle. You don't get "sick" or a fever. You may have a little bit of trouble with your eyes. Or you get problems with your carpal tunnel (RSI). The easy explanation will be, in both cases, that you spend too much time in front of computers. Or you have a bit more trouble finding good sleep. Your digestion acts up - but just a bit, if you went to a gastroenterologist they'd send you home "we found nothing wrong". The list goes on and on.

Are people misdiagnosed?

Maybe, I'd say probably - but there is no proven alternative. None. We just don't know.

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There is a general mismatch problem with medical knowledge based on observation and statistics: It is one thing to know that x percent of a certain population have a problem. It is a completely different problem going the other way: If you have an individual, in front of you, does (s)he have the problem or not? The probability you have is of no use to you, you have to make a decision, yea/nay?

A prudent doctor, knowing that the odds are low, will always say "no" in such a case, and statistically speaking that's the winning strategy from a public health point of view. You know you lose a few, but that's the minimum, if you tried finding out who actually has the problem (that you cannot reliably diagnose on an individual level) your overall statistics would get worse. That means knowledge of a problem on the scale of the population is almost useless when it comes to making individual treatment decisions. You need something on that (individual) level. In the case of long-term exposure (or any exposure) to low-dose poisons we don't have much that we can use, not on the individual level.

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[0] https://www.edx.org/course/biology-water-health-fundamentals...

Keyword here: "acute". Nothing about chronic exposure, which is what is relevant here. Even if they did have a long-term study of low-dose exposure, it would be an extremely limited one (rats, mice, controlled conditions) missing the mix of much more stuff we are exposed to all the time.

Having suffered from (finally clinically diagnosed and clinically treated with chelators DMPS and DMSA - with great results) low-dose long-term heavy metal poisoning I had to find out, both myself (studying as much as I could) and from the doctors, that there basically exists next to zero clinically relevant research for a) low-dose exposure, b) long-term, c) (and this one is by far the worst) a mix of chemicals rather than examining just one or two at a time in isolation. The last one is very relevant - mixing stuff often dramatically changes the effect. I once found an LD (lethal dose) heavy metal poisoning study on rats where mixing lead and mercury was about a thousand times more lethal (i.e. 1/1000th the dose of both) compared to poisoning the rats with only one of them.

The reason isn't a conspiracy of course, it's just impractical to impossible to study anything but acute poisonings and only of one or very few chemicals at a time.

Also, each time somebody recites officially allowed values I cringe - for example, the medical science opinion about the desirable lead exposure is zero. However, of course this isn't practical - and this is what all those official limits are: Administrative practical values, considering what can be done, where the research stands (always erring on the opposite side of caution - you have to prove the bad effect before the limits are lowered) and at what cost.

So no, science does not have the answer about any of this. The internal medicine + environmental medicine research doctor that was my main doc is pretty pessimistic about the stuff we (humans) do, and this guy lives with the research, always citing this or that new study when we meet.

Maybe I should add that there indeed are lots and lots of studies. However, they are incredibly specific, they won't be the basis for tougher legislation/lower official limits, because even if you take a hundred (good) studies of that kind you did not prove that the specific effect observed in the lab is relevant "in the world setting", and/or on humans, and/or what the combined net effect of "everything" might be. Which is, at least today, pretty much impossible.

Independent of knowing who he is and how "famous" he is, I'm only looking at the one thing I got from/about him: This interview. What I see is a very, very shallow article, both questions as well as the answers. Elevator music comes to my mind, not a symphony.

That doesn't say anything about his abilities, but I'm not here to judge the person but the article.

I think trying to find out "who he is" and his accomplishments is actually bad: Let's just concentrate on the article. It doesn't get better or worse if I were to know anything more about the guy. Everything that we are here to talk about is there - I really don't understand some of the comments where people try to discuss the person instead of the content. Neither attacking the person or elevating him are of any help.

Speaking from Germany:

While lots of professionals speak English more or less well, what is telling to me and a big indicator that the situation does not look as good as some people want to believe is the fact that there is hardly any English-language cinema or movies/series (on TV).

Even where I am, a major German city, there is the one huge cinema complex (10 cinemas) that only shows 2 or 3 English language movies - in their smallest rooms and with less than 10% of seats taken. Every single movie and TV series gets German speakers for this market.

I can't say how reliable of an indicator this is, but I think given that this stuff (TV and cinema) still is a huge part of daily mass entertainment the fact that those offering the (often originally US-made) material choose to spend a lot of effort creating a German voice track pretty much without exception probably is significant.

People who can go to a doctor freely go sooner and don't (have to) wait until things get really bad - at which point treatment also gets far more complicated, lengthy and expensive, and that relationship is not linear. I don't need to wait until the tooth is truly rotten and now the jaw and bones holding it are impacted, because I have no incentive to delay and safe the expense, which is even worse for the many uninsured and under-insured.

I grew up in the GDR (East Germany) for the first 17 years of my life. While I turned out well, I had years and years of close contact with a large variety of doctors, for my eyes, sleep EEG, LOTS of small problems. I was a regular visitor of a pretty sizable variety of doctors in various places, not just the hometown.

The fears expressed hear from Americans about that kind of health care, to me, are simply ridiculous. The system worked darn well. I got soooo much, and I wasn't even all that sick, and that in a really poor country (compared to Wet Germany).

By the way, we did have a "top layer" of doctors (in East Germany) where you needed more (don't know if it was money or favors or if they selected you), who were far better than the normal ones. Still, nothing any more outrageous than now - the best are few, everywhere. Getting to them wasn't a matter of being rich though (I know because I got to see one or two of such top doctors).

Interestingly, a friend of mine found that getting the "top doctors" even now does not have to be a question of money. His wife got cancer and the standard treatment would have given her 6 months. He had money and brain, he checked the literature and did his research to find the best doctors relevant for his wife's case - and all it needed to get them to treat his wife was a few phone calls. Not a single additional Euro was spent, they didn't want any. They were cancer researchers at German university clinics, but he also checked with experts in the US. the experimental treatments she got and that gave her a few more years (instead of 6 months) were all paid for by the "Krankenkasse" (the common public insurance vs. private insurance, which exists too). They paid the huge sums without question but refused paying tiny amounts for small stuff...